Iceman shares his empire with North Lawndale

October 22, 2006|By Rex W. Huppke, Tribune staff reporter

Walker Harris is an iceman, has been for more than 30 years. He has bagged it, heaved blocks of it, chopped it and dropped it, felt its cold burn on his hands so many times it's like the warm touch of an old friend.

He has built a West Side empire on ice, brought jobs and second chances to a neighborhood in need and drawn young men off the streets with indisputable proof that hard work pays off.

Harris' product now fills the cups at every White Sox home game and chills the sodas at every Taste of Chicago.

With summer's swelter past, this work-worn, middle-aged man pulls up an overturned bucket outside his North Lawndale plant, plunks down and lights a cigarette.

"I would always like to see this place standing," Harris says. "I built it from nothin'."

There's a nip of autumn in the air, the season when an iceman has time to reflect. Time to rest his sore muscles and tell of a beautiful life built on sweat and love and blocks of frozen water.

Walker Harris was the last of 10 children born on a cotton farm in rural northwest Louisiana. He grew up plucking cotton bolls with his father and siblings in the kind of heat that made ice a fleeting luxury.

"We were early risers," Harris says. "We went to bed late and didn't quit until the job was done."

His family stressed education, but Harris, at age 18, decided he wouldn't go to college. Instead, he headed north to Chicago seeking work and dreaming of someday owning a business.

Laying the foundation

It was the early 1970s. One of his sisters already lived in the city so he roomed with her and quickly found a job at an ice company's West Side distribution center.

Harris hustled along the loading dock, hoisting 100-pound blocks of ice for 10 hours a day without complaint.

When business was slow, he'd pick up a brush and start painting the building, or grab a ladder and muck out the gutters.

In 1973, the company, City Ice, decided to shut the North Lawndale site. Harris saw an opportunity. He told management he'd like to buy the property and start his own ice delivery service.

"They gave it to me for no money down," Harris says. "They knew I was a hard worker, so I guess they believed in me. They gave me the key and said as long as I kept buying ice from them, I could use the building."

The first thing he needed was a truck. Harris called his family in Louisiana and asked them to find him a used pick-up--cheap.

A brother asked why he needed it.

"I'm going to use it for ice deliveries," Harris said.

"How are you going to keep the ice from melting?" the brother asked.

"I'm fast," Harris said.

His brother found him an ugly, green 3/4-ton Chevy with 160,000 miles on it. Harris went to Louisiana on a Saturday, spent the night and most of the next day rebuilding the truck's engine. Then he drove it to Chicago in time to start deliveries Monday morning.

With his business on its way up, Harris soon secured a loan and paid off the brick building on West 5th Avenue. He'd buy ice from City Ice for about a decade, building sales routes across the city and putting 500,000 additional miles on that old green truck.

Each time he landed 60 new customers, he'd buy a refrigerated truck and hire a driver from the neighborhood. He started with 26 customers. There are now more than 1,200.

In 1984, Harris stopped buying ice and bought an icemaker for $150,000. "I thought I was the greatest man in the whole world. I could make 20 tons of ice a day."

And he was still selling out.

These days, Harris Ice Co. can make 80 tons of cubed and crushed ice a day, along with an additional 20 tons of block ice.

Caring for community

At 54, Harris nimbly climbs the factory's steep, steel-grid steps. He swings open the door of an icemaker, listens to the buzz and rattle of its 75-horsepower compressor.

"We're going to need to tweak the timing on this just a bit," he says. "It sounds off."

He likes to keep repair work in-house, making the factory self-sufficient.

Similarly, Harris has always made it a priority to hire people from within the North Lawndale community.

"I think that's a major part of his success," says Eric Strickland, executive director of the Lawndale Business and Local Development Corporation. "The fact that he cares about the community. He's always focused on helping others."

Strickland says Harris' company--which people in the neighborhood call "The Ice House"--helped create a micro-economy on the West Side by selling individual bags of sno-cone ice and jugs of flavored syrups to budding entrepreneurs.

"He's a major supplier for that," Strickland says. "You'll see people lined up 10 or 20 deep in the summer just getting all the crushed ice for their sno-balls. That's folks from all over the West Side finding ways to make money."